Top 100 Robert Penn Warren Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Any act of pure perception is a feat, and if you don’t believe it, try it sometime. But.”

— Robert Penn Warren

52. “That summer we had been absolutely alone, together, even when people were around, the only inhabitants of the kind of floating island or magic carpet which being in love is.”

— Robert Penn Warren

53. “What you don’t know don’t hurt you, for it ain’t real. They called that Idealism in my book I had when I was in college, and after I got hold of that principle I became an Idealist. I was.”

— Robert Penn Warren

54. “Everything seems an echo of something else.”

— Robert Penn Warren

55. “I tried to tell her how if you could not accept the past and its burden there was no future, for without one there cannot be the other, and if you could accept the past you might hope for the future, for only out of the past can you make a future.”

— Robert Penn Warren

56. “Storytelling and copulation are the two chief forms of amusement in the South. They’re inexpensive and easy to procure.”

— Robert Penn Warren

57. “I don’t expect you’ll hear me writing any poems to the greater glory of Ronald and Nancy Reagan.”

— Robert Penn Warren

58. “The image that fiction presents is purged of the distractions, confusions and accidents of ordinary life.”

— Robert Penn Warren

59. “If you are an idealist, it does not matter what you do or what goes on around you because it isn’t real anyway.”

— Robert Penn Warren

60. “My only crime was being a man and living in the world of men, and you don’t have to do special penance for that. The crime and the penance, in that case, coincide perfectly. They are identical.”

— Robert Penn Warren

61. “But old Mr. Sandeen, who was the father of one of the dead kids, saw him back in the crowd and while the clods were still bouncing off the coffin lids Mr. Sandeen pushed back to him and grabbed him by the hand and lifted up one arm above his head and said, loud, “Oh, God, I am punished for accepting iniquity and voting against an honest man!”

— Robert Penn Warren

62. “The poet is in the end probably more afraid of the dogmatist who wants to extract the message from the poem and throw the poem away than he is of the sentimentalist who says, Oh, just let me enjoy the poem.”

— Robert Penn Warren

63. “Only I thought that the Rip Van Winkle story was all wrong. You went to sleep for a long time, and when you woke up nothing whatsoever had changed. No matter how long you slept, it was the same.”

— Robert Penn Warren

64. “The wind would come down a thousand miles and pound on the house and the sash would rattle and inside him something would be big and coiling slow and clotting till he would hold his breath and the blood would beat in his head with a hollow sound as though his head were a cave as big as the dark outside. He wouldn’t have any name for what was big inside him. Maybe there isn’t any name.”

— Robert Penn Warren

65. “Maybe a man has to sell his soul to get the power to do good.”

— Robert Penn Warren

66. “Dying – shucks! If you kin handle the living, what’s to be afraid of the dying?”

— Robert Penn Warren

67. “History is not melodrama, even if it usually reads like that.”

— Robert Penn Warren

68. “I had not understood then what I think I have now come to understand: that we can keep the past only by having the future, for they are forever tied together. Therefore.”

— Robert Penn Warren

69. “Mortimer had killed Judge Irwin because Judge Irwin had killed him, and I had killed Judge Irwin because Judge Irwin created me, and looking at matters in that light one could say that Mortimer and I were merely the twin instruments of Judge Irwin’s protracted and ineluctable destruction. For either killing or creating may be a crime punishable by death, and the death always comes by the criminal’s own hand and every man is a suicide. If a man knew how to live he would never die.”

— Robert Penn Warren

70. “I think the greatest curse of American society has been the idea of an easy millennialism – that some new drug, or the next election or the latest in social engineering will solve everything.”

— Robert Penn Warren

71. “A diamond ain’t a thing in the world but a piece of dirt that got awful hot. And God-a-Mighty picked up a handful of dirt and blew on it and made you and me and George Washington and mankind blessed in faculty and apprehension. It all depends on what you do with the dirt. That right?”

— Robert Penn Warren

72. “The urge to write poetry is like having an itch. When the itch becomes annoying enough, you scratch it.”

— Robert Penn Warren

73. “Historical sense and poetic sense should not, in the end, be contradictory, for if poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth we live, and in our living, constantly remake.”

— Robert Penn Warren

74. “There is nothing like a good book to put you to sleep with the illusion that life is rich and meaningful.”

— Robert Penn Warren

75. “Nobody had ever told me that anything could be like this.”

— Robert Penn Warren

76. “He was a lawyer now and it had taken him a long time. It had taken him a long time because he had had to be a lawyer on his own terms and in his own way. But that was over. But maybe it had taken him too long. If something takes too long, something happens to you. You become all and only the thing you want and nothing else, for you have paid too much for it, too much in wanting and too much in waiting and too much in getting. In the end they just ask you those crappy little questions.”

— Robert Penn Warren

77. “Good-bye, Lois, and I forgive for you everything I did to you.”

— Robert Penn Warren

78. “For West is where we all plan to go some day. It is where you go when the land gives out and the old-field pines encroach. It is where you go when you get the letter saying: Flee, all is discovered. It is where you go when you look down at the blade in your hand and the blood on it. It is where you go when you are told that you are a bubble on the tide of empire. It is where you go when you hear that thar’s gold in them-thar hills. It is where you go to grow up with the country. It is where you go to spend your old age. Or it is just where you go.”

— Robert Penn Warren

79. “Los verdaderos escritores son aquellos que quieren escribir, necesitan escribir, tienen que escribir.”

— Robert Penn Warren

80. “A symbol serves to combine heart and intellect.”

— Robert Penn Warren

81. “When one is happy in forgetfulness, facts get forgotten.”

— Robert Penn Warren

82. “Suddenly his face wasn’t twitching. It was smooth as a baby’s and peaceful, but peaceful in the way that intensity can sometimes momentarily make a face look peaceful and pure.”

— Robert Penn Warren

83. “For either killing or creating may be a crime punishable by death, and the death always comes by the criminal’s own hand and every man is suicide. If a man knew how to live he would never die.”

— Robert Penn Warren

84. “Poets, we know, are terribly sensitive people, and in my observation one of the things they are most sensitive about is money.”

— Robert Penn Warren

85. “The poem is not a thing we see; it is, rather, a light by which we may see.”

— Robert Penn Warren

86. “She kept her looks very well and continued, in a rather severe way, to pay attention to her dress. There were moments now when her laugh sounded a little hollow and brittle, the laughter of nerves not of mirth or good spirits. Occasionally in a conversation she seemed to lose track and fall into a self-absorption, to start up overwhelmed by embarrassment and unspoken remorse... She was pushing thirty-five. But she could still be good company.”

— Robert Penn Warren

87. “But, the stultifying lingo aside, the question I raise is a vital one for us all, we are all stuck with trying to find the meaning of our lives, and the only thing we have to work on, or with, is our past.”

— Robert Penn Warren

88. “She cleared them out, and fast. The car went off down the gravel road with the springs flat on the rear axle and human flesh oozing out the windows, then the evening quiet descended upon us.”

— Robert Penn Warren

89. “If I didn’t look around it would not be true that somebody had opened the gate with the creaky hinges, and that is a wonderful principle for a man to get hold of. I had got hold of the.”

— Robert Penn Warren

90. “I went back to my own innocent little chores and sat in my office as the fall drew imperceptibly on and the earth leaned on its axis and shouldered the spot I occupied a little out of the direct, billowing, crystalline, consuming blaze of the enormous sun.”

— Robert Penn Warren

91. “Now, an individual, one fellow, he will stop doing business because he’s got a notion of what is right, and he is a hero. But folks in general, which is society, Doc, is never going to stop doing business. Society is just going to cook up a new notion of what is right. Society is sure not ever going to commit suicide. At least, not that way and of a purpose.”

— Robert Penn Warren

92. “But listen here, there ain’t anything worth doing a man can do and keep his dignity.”

— Robert Penn Warren

93. “He’s interested in Willie. Quite simply and directly. And when anybody is interested in himself quite simply and directly the way Willie is interested in Willie you call it genius. It’s only the half-baked people like Mr. Patton who are interested in money. Even the big boys who make a real lot of money aren’t interested in money. Henry Ford isn’t interested in money. He is interested in Henry Ford and therefore he is a genius.”

— Robert Penn Warren

94. “We all knew the great lesson of history; I from reading it and they from living it. And the lesson is: it is more blessed to kill than to be killed.”

— Robert Penn Warren

95. “And when anybody is interested in himself quite simply and directly the way Willie is interested in Willie you call it genius. It’s.”

— Robert Penn Warren

96. “I ought to have guessed that a person like her – a person who you could tell had a deep inner certitude of self which comes from being all of one piece, of not being shreds and patches and old cogwheels held together with pieces of rusty barbed wire and spit and bits of string, like most of us – I ought to have guessed that that kind of person would not be surprised into answering a question she didn’t want to answer.”

— Robert Penn Warren

97. “I remember distinctly the retarded, inexorable grind of the gravel under the iron tires, a sound that seemed to declare some irreversible process in which we were trapped, as though we were coffee beans dropped in a coffee grinder as big as the world.”

— Robert Penn Warren

98. “If the human race didn’t remember anything it would be perfectly happy.”

— Robert Penn Warren

99. “Politics is action and all action is but a flaw in the perfection of inaction, which is peace, just as all being is but a flaw in the perfection of nonbeing. Which is God. For if God is perfection and the only perfection is in nonbeing, then God is nonbeing. Then God is nothing. Nothing can give no basis for the criticism of Thing in its thingness. Then where do you get anything to say? Then where do you get off?”

— Robert Penn Warren

100. “That old unionism was, however, very different from the kind we live with now. We do not live with an ideal, sometimes on the defensive, of union. We live with the overriding, overwhelming fact, a fact so technologically, economically, and politically validated that we usually forget to ask how fully this fact represents a true community, the spiritually significant communion which the old romantic unionism had envisaged.”

— Robert Penn Warren